Inducing Resistance to Conspiracy Theory Propaganda: Testing Inoculation and Metainoculation Strategies

“Most gaming experiments have been conducted in a classroom during a lesson time when students are primed to be in a learning mode (e.g. Banas and Miller 2013; Roozenbeek and van der Linden 2019).”

“Previously conducted inoculation studies guided the development of the inoculation messages that state the message should enact a sense of threat by forewarning individuals they may see an attack ad and providing counter-arguments to what will be shared in the attack (Banas & Miller, 2013).”

“…of inoculation strategy involves highlighting the deceptive rhetorical tactics or logical fallacies that commonly accompany misinformation, rather than directly counterarguing specific misinformation (Banas & Miller, 2013; Lewandowsky & van der Linden, 2021; van der Linden & Roozenbeek, 2020).”

“Such strategies might remind information receivers to check messages for faulty logic and inconsistencies so common in dis-information (e.g., Banas & Miller, 2013; Banas et al., 2024; O’Mahoney et al., 2023) or teach people how to spot a troll on social media (Lees et al., 2023) or how to recognize…”

“Finally, the meta-inoculation intervention inhibited the effectiveness of both the fact-focused and the logic-focused inoculations (Banas & Miller, 2013).”

“Anticonspiracy messaging creates cognitive dissonance by exposing and explaining the misinformation and negative emotional appeals around vaccines (Banas & Miller, 2013).”

“Unlike prior fake news interventions using nudges 17,24,65–69 , inoculation techniques 27,53–57, 70– 78 , or digital Despite using social motivations, it does not mean that the cognitive changes are unexpected or could not happen.”

“Critical thinking skills, inquiry, and inoculation are strong adversaries against propaganda and authoritarianism (Banas & Miller, 2013; Dewey, 1954; Pratkanis & Aronson, 1992).”

“Les théories du complot les plus populaires et partagées sont sans doute les théories du complot concernant l’attaque des tours jumelles du 11 septembre 2001 aux ÉtatsUnis (Banas & Miller, 2013 ; Jamil & Rousseau, 2011 ; Swami, Chamorro-Premuzic, & Furnham, 2010), celles ayant trait à l’accident de voiture qui a condu…”

“Many stories of exits from the manosphere reflect how prolonged exposure to red pill and incel ideologies lead to self-loathing, anger, and low self-esteem.”

“Inoculation can be abused to meta-inoculate recipients against debunkings of conspiracy theories 72 .”

“Such interventions could be based on fact-based inoculation that include a warning of the conspiracy narrative as a targeted influential attack [52] or could be an adaption of already validated interventions like fake news online games that train users to recognize and resist false information [53].”

“…of contexts (Banas & Rains, 2010; Compton, 2013), and it has more recently been applied to inhibit conspiracy theories like the 9/11 Truth movement (Banas & Miller, 2013), climate change (Cook et al., 2017), and other types of misinformation (e.g., Basol et al., 2021; Compton et al., 2021;…”

“Banas and Miller (2013) found that inoculation messages with a fact-based argument structure was effective to induce resistance against conspiracy theory propaganda.”

“The control message was about the history of sushi, a topic commonly used in inoculation studies as a control (e.g., Banas & Miller, 2013).”

“Furthermore, empirical work on online moral expression indicates that exposure to diverse viewpoints can both enhance moral reasoning and intensify polarization, depending on the quality of interaction and reflexive capacity of users (Banas & Miller, 2021; Guess et al., 2021).”

“…to reducing the uptake of conspiracy beliefs may work: (a) anti-conspiracy “ inoculation ” messages that directly attack the root of conspiracies (Banas and Miller, 2013; Banas and Rains, 2010), (b) priming respondents on logic or resistance to persuasion (Bonetto et al., 2019; Swami et al.,…”

“The control message was a Facebook post about the origins of sushi common in studies about resisting persuasive messages (Banas & Miller, 2013).”

“In recent years, inoculation research has incorporated technique-based inoculation (also termed logic-based; Banas & Miller, 2013; Compton et al., 2021; Cook et al., 2017; Lewandowsky & van der Linden, 2021).”

“…theories increases belief in them (e.g. Jolley et al., 2019; Jolley & Douglas, 2014a, 2014b; Kim & Cao, 2016; van der Linden, 2015) and another demonstrating the effectiveness of prebunking in reducing conspiracy beliefs (e.g. Banas & Miller, 2013; Jolley & Douglas, 2017; Mason et al., 2024).”

“…as “inoculation” or “prebunking,” with two distinct aspects: (1) an “explicit warning of an impending threat of being misled” and (2) “refutation of the misinformation’s arguments,” noting that fact-and logic-based inoculations have been successful in prebunking a 9/11 conspiracy theory [27].”

“In their studies, the meta-inoculation treatment did not provide any refutation of the arguments provided in the inoculation treatment; therefore, the response made by meta-inoculation was thought to occur through a more heuristic process (Banas & Miller, 2013).”

“(Banas & Miller, 2013).”

“En dos casos, algunas hipótesis no fueron verificadas debido a la falta de diferencias significativas entre los grupos de trata-miento (Banas & Miller, 2013; Jiang et al., 2022).”

“While fact-checking relies on external evidence (Guo et al., 2022), detecting conspiratorial traits requires recognizing rhetorical patterns within the text itself, such as dismissal for Immune to evidence or hedging for Overriding suspicion .”

“Such information can come from, for example, fictional movies (Mulligan and Habel 2013), documentary films (Banas and Miller 2013; Kim and Cao 2016), social media (Enders et al. 2021b), and mainstream news reports (Einstein and Glick 2015), and can drive audiences to believe in conspiracy theories.”

“…on obtaining data about what works, what really functions in order to prevent some target population from adopting certain questionable beliefs (Banas & Miller, 2013; Compton & Pfau, 2008; Cook et al., 2017; Linden et al., 2017; Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2019; van der Linden et al., 2020).”

“…of con-spiracy theories, diminished trust in pharmaceutical companies, scepticism towards government health agencies advocating for vaccines, and concerns about perceived infringements on personal liberties (Abdel-Raheem and Alkhammash, 2021; Banas and Miller, 2013; Ganczak et al., 2017).”

“As such, this process is similar to meta-inoculation (Banas & Miller, 2013), whereby individuals were not inoculated against the risky behavior itself, but rather against the process of reactance that can result from inoculation.”

“Banas and Miller (2013) inoculated against a conspiracy film using fact-based and logic-based refutational pretreatments.”

“…the confidence of the target audience may be boosted when they successfully resist persuasion (Kamarkar & Tormala, 2010; Tormala & Petty, 2002, 2004); that is, certain after-effects may be produced because of the resistance and these effects may even influence the persuaders (Banas & Miller, 2013).”

“Conspiracy theories are defined as causal narratives that attribute events to covert plans orchestrated by a secret cabal (Banas and Miller, 2013).”

“Research shows that such a pre-emptive approach can be successful in various settings through the use of “ resistance to persuasion ” (85).”

“As primary prevention measures, prebunking interventions aim to achieve psychological immunization before exposure to disinformation to reduce susceptibility to manipulation (Banas & Miller, 2013; Basol et al., 2020; Roozenbeek et al., 2020).”

“Prior work demonstrates that inoculation messages considerably shorter than long-form attacks can still generate resistance (e.g., Banas & Miller, 2013; Banas et al., 2024), suggesting that length matching is not a prerequisite for efficacy.”

“Early work focused on defending truisms (Compton, 2013; McGuire, 1981/1964), while later research applied inoculation across domains such as health, politics, conspiracy beliefs, and also misinformation (Banas & Miller, 2013; Lu et al., 2023; Pfau & Burgoon, 1988; Pfau et al., 1992).”

“Even more explicitly, gamified inoculation against misinformation has incorporated humor into the design of technique-based inoculation interventions (technique-or logic-based inoculations focus on the underlying tricks and fallacies rather than specific issues, see Banas & Miller, 2013).”

“…various types of misinformation, including science denials (Roozenbeek et al., 2022; Van der Linden et al., 2017; Wood, 2007), conspiracy theories (Banas & Miller, 2013), politically polarized content (Smith et al., 2025), extremism (Braddock, 2022; Lewandowsky & Yesilada, 2021) and misleading…”

“…theory to diverse topics has developed over time, informing effective interventions against marketing campaigns (Compton & Pfau, 2004), climate change misinformation (van der Linden et al., 2017), conspiracy theories (Banas & Miller, 2013), and more (for a review see Traberg et al., 2022).”

“Several studies have demonstrated the inoculation effect [3], [4].”